Scotland's Forged Tartans

The first serious refutation of the Sobieskis' Vestiarium
Scoticum appeared in 1847 in Volume 81 of the Quarterly Review
which was, a year later, answered by the Sobieskis in a printed
pamphlet. It would have been interesting indeed to see the
brothers' response to the first serious study of the Vestiarium
Scoticum - Scotland's Forged Tartans - and the expert
dissection - thread by thread - of the brothers' preposterous
claims. Jamie Scarlett was the editor of that publication and his
introduction is reproduced below.
About the year 1820 (the exact date is doubtful) there appeared
upon the Highland scene two young men, the brothers John and
Charles Hay Allan. Undoubtedly charming and talented, their
passport among the Highland aristocracy, however, was the widely
held belief that they were the legitimate grandsons of Prince
Charles Edward Stuart, the 'Bonnie Prince Charlie' of The '45, the
story being that their father, Thomas Carter Allan, had been born
to Prince Charles and his wife, the Princess Louisa of Stolberg
Guedern, and had been immediately smuggled away into the care of a
naval Admiral to save him from possible harm at the hands of the
Hanoverians. The truth of this story has been argued at length and
somewhat inconclusively and, in fairness to the brothers, it must
be pointed out that their biographer has stated that they never
themselves made this claim. Nevertheless, they cannot have been
unaware of it or of the immense value of the prestige which it
conferred upon them and they certainly did nothing to refute it.
However, all this is of little present moment.
It was not long before the brothers began to let it be known that
they had in their possession an ancient manuscript which gave
precise details of all the old Clan tartans and to hand out details
of these to their friends some of whom, it would seem, had not
previously known that they had Clan tartans. Soon the single
manuscript became two, the original supposedly dating from the end
of the sixteenth century and called the Douay Manuscript from its
having been discovered in the library of the Scots College there,
and the other, stated to be a late and inferior copy, dated 1721
and known as the Cromarty Manuscript. Much later, there came a
third document, allegedly another version of the first, although
differing markedly from it, and named after the place of its
discovery, the St Augustine Monastery at Cadiz.
In, 1842, under the title of Vestiarium Scoticum, the brothers
published an edited version of their documents in which the tartan
of each clan was described and illustrated. Long before the
publication of the Vestiarium, the documents that went into it were
the subject of much controversy but, it being an age when the
hurling of abuse at one's opponents by way of magazine articles was
considered to be a fair substitute for logical argument, little
enlightenment resulted. The tartan trade, ever in search of
business, leapt gladly upon the new 'old' tartans and nobody even
stopped to consider that the 'exact' descriptions left so much
latitude in interpretation that the tartans shown must have come
largely from the imagination of the illustrator, brother
Charles.
There matters remained for many years, untilJ.C. Thompson, an
American philologist already interested in the Vestiarium, raised
with D.C. Stewart the question of the whereabouts of a certain set
of photographs of the Cromarty MS. That particular set of
photographs, actually languishing unknown in the archives of the
Scottish Tartans Society, proved to be largely illegible but, soon
after, good fortune put another set of photographs, twice as big
and almost completely legible, into Thompson's hands. Meanwhile,
Stewart, himself considering a critical study of the Vestiarium
from the tartan point of view, had proposed collaboration on the
project.This work is the result of their co-operation, Stewart
working on the tartans and Thompson on the language of the
manuscripts. Between them, they have shown, with little room for
doubt, that the Vestiarium Scoticum and the documents leading up to
it were forgeries. It is perhaps the first scholarly attempt to
make a critical study of the subject and it is not likely that it
will go unanswered. However, the authors have extracted some quite
damning evidence in the course of their investigations, not the
least important of which is the frequency with which tartans
described in the manuscripts can be related to designs current in
the 1830's.
It is sad that Donald Stewart did not live to see this work
published. He would have enjoyed it, as he would have enjoyed
answering his critics.
James Scarlett